


Daniel's First Six Languages

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 5 Things, Backstory, Character Study, Childhood, Community: sg1_five_things, Gen, Languages and Linguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-06
Updated: 2007-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian





	Daniel's First Six Languages

Arabic was the first. Or so his parents told him; they told him he was born in Egypt and that he picked up Arabic first because it was what they spoke half the time -- even with him, without thinking -- and what most of the people around him were speaking. Or so he remembers them telling him. Since the amnesia after his Ascension, he doesn't always trust his memories, and whatever birth certificate was ever on record for him is long vanished, so he can't actually prove where he was born, or even that he was born at all. But he does lapse into Arabic, without thinking, when he's very pissed or very stressed or very excited. That's enough to confirm what he remembers of what his parents told him. He just wishes his own past and his own mind didn't amount to one of his own archaeolinguistics projects.

English was the second. Canadian English, in fact, and Québécois French the third, once the two of them got untwisted in his head and on his tongue, after starting out -- so he remembers being told -- as a kind of pidgin. He had various local nannies when he was a toddler, but the person who looked after him most of the time ended up being a woman from Quebec City who in fact refused to speak Arabic unless she had to. She was on his parents' staff as an archaeological assistant, but after having Daniel foisted off on her a few times she ended up getting quite fond of him. She also had the patience and multi-tasking ability to cope with having him along with her when she worked -- his parents, even between the two of them, couldn't manage that -- and so he spent a lot of time with her, and learned the two languages she preferred to speak. Now he can't even remember her name.

If you don't count the Parisian French they tried to correct his perfectly good French to in an American school he attended for a year in Botswana -- he learned Parisian French but continued to use his "native" French as the default, and he didn't let them "correct" his English, either, although after he'd lived in the States for a while, later on, a lot of the Canadian rubbed away -- then Latin was his fourth language, and Greek his fifth. His parents insisted on both, to the tune of expensive private tutors they couldn't afford but hired to come to their London flat when he was seven because they didn't have the time to teach him themselves. He was a quick study, and could read both quite well by the time they died, but speaking and listening came harder to him, and he's always felt as if he let them down somehow, not excelling in all facets of the only thing they ever really sternly demanded he do and do well. They loved him fiercely; he knows that. But there was never enough time for the things that were really important.

His next language was American Sign Language, which he learned in an upstate New York public school after Nick had rejected him and he'd been fostered out in the state his parents died in. The experimental program at the school lasted only a year, but it happened to be the year he was there, so he lucked out. He taught himself to read Braille at the same time. He'd just started to need glasses and lived in a terror of going blind, probably some kind of weird displacement reaction to his parents' death. ASL had motivated him to start shoring himself up with the skills he might need if some part of him stopped working. It was a phase that lasted until sometime after he was twelve. He feels sorry for that very scared, very lonely kid now, but he's glad he can understand and communicate with his hands, and he doesn't regret the other skills he picked up. He works in a crazy business these days, and you never know when you're going to need to know how to write with your off hand, or dial a phone with your toe, or read with your tongue.


End file.
